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The end of it was that I reached the very crest of the mount, a patch of bare, brown rock, except at one spot on its southern front where there was a little hollow in which at this rainy season of the year herbage and ferns grew in the accumulated soil, also a few stunted, aloe-like plants.
I have noticed the bushes moving rather strangely behind us once or twice already, but I did not like to say anything, fearing you would think me foolish and nervous; but this instant I distinctly saw a dark object glide swiftly behind that large aloe-like shrub with the beautiful purple blossoms that we stood admiring so long." "An animal?" I exclaimed.
If the dragon's-blood tree, with its close-set, radiating branches and stiff, aloe-like leaves, is quaint and some might be inclined to say ugly it has, nevertheless, its economic use; but not so its still quainter comrade on the slopes of Mount Haghier, the gouty, swollen-stemmed Adenium.
I looked behind me, meditating retreat, and there, some hundreds of yards away behind low, scrubby mimosas mixed with aloe-like plants, I saw something brown toss up and disappear again that might very well have been the trunk of an elephant. Then, animated by the courage of despair and a desire to know the worst, I began to descend the elephant track towards the lake almost at a run.
A handsome and rare plant, of aloe-like appearance, with a white blossom rising in the centre of its sword-leaves. I remember the time when I, and a brother who was with me, devoutly believed in a being whom we supposed to live among certain black, water-rotted, weed-grown stakes by the sea.
It was fronted by huge columns, tapering upward from massive plinths, and with capitals that, as I came nearer, I perceived to be more ornamental and more fantastically graceful that Egyptian architecture allows. As the Corinthian capital mimics the leaf of the acanthus, so the capitals of these columns imitated the foliage of the vegetation neighbouring them, some aloe-like, some fern-like.
The palmetto spoken of is, in truth, not a "palmetto," though a plant of kindred genus. It is a yucca of a species peculiar to the high table plains of Northern and Central Mexico, with long sword-shaped leaves springing aloe-like from a core in the centre, and radiating in all directions, so as to form a spherical chevaux-de-frize.
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